by J. J. McAvoy
Vicious Minds: Part 3
J.J. McAvoy
This ebook is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only.
This ebook may not be sold, shared, or given away.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Vicious Minds: Part 3
Copyright © 2020 by J.J. McAvoy
Ebook ISBN: 9781641971614
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Afterword
Also by J.J. McAvoy
About the Author
Dedicated to
Those of you who came back,
Thank you!
Now let’s finish this.
1
“It's a very dark tale of
greed, betrayal, and revenge...
and at the heart of it all was a beautiful girl.”
~Emerson Winn
ETHAN
I walked through the bullet-ridden halls of my home the day after my wedding, the sound of silence echoing with each step I took.
Everyone but one person was now weeping around the body of my Aunt Coraline. And when I walked into our bedroom, that one person now sat calmly on the edge bed, no longer wearing her second wedding dress but a simple white and gray robe, with a bottle of red wine in hand. I closed the door behind me and locked it.
“Darcy threatened you?” she spoke coldly.
“He says to call him Killian now,” I said as I walked to her.
“That fits much better,” she muttered and drank from the bottle. “He has a long way to go before he is the man you want him to be, though. Let alone a real rival against you.”
“You’ve made yourself enemy number one now, Calliope. They will never forgive you.”
She snickered, shaking her head. “I don’t need their forgiveness. I don’t care about their forgiveness. They are not the reason I’m here. You are, so why aren’t you asking me why?”
“Because I think I know why,” I replied, placing my gun against her skull. “But I could be wrong. I’m 90% sure I’m not. But that 10% is always a nagging bitch.”
She stared up at me, unfazed. “Could you even pull the trigger?”
“Sadly, yes. You know that.” I pulled back the hammer. “It would look bad to kill you after such a public wedding or renewal of vows, or cover story, or distraction, or whatever else we are calling today.”
“Yes, it would. People would say you were cursed. That all the women on your arm end up dead.” She smiled and drank anyway despite the gun. “It would take a lot of effort to clean this up.”
BANG.
I shot the bottle right beside us. Calliope turned her face to protect herself, but it didn’t stop the glass or the wine from splattering all over her and even onto me.
“That was a waste of good wine,” she grumbled, wiping her cheek, but I held the gun back to her face. She just glared at it and then back up to me with tired eyes. “You already know I’m going to tell you the truth. And why today had to happen the way it happened…for both your plan and mine. So, what is the gun for? If you didn’t use it when Fiorello was in here with me, why would you use it now?”
“Because now I can show that I am upset, very fucking upset.” I knew what she was going to tell me. I saw both our paths had finally become one. I just hated the fact that it had to come together in this way—right over the body of my aunt.
“Who else in this family could I have chosen?” she whispered, pressing her hand on mine and leaning into the gun. “People die in war, Ethan. We weren’t here when it started, but we still have to fight anyway. You knew that. Everyone in this family is supposed to know that. Cora knew it. She said it was the number one rule of the family.”
Callahan rule number one—“You kill for family. You die for your family because you can’t trust anyone else.”
Slowly I put down my gun. There was no one else here but us. My parents were now on the run for their lives. Fiorello and all the rest of my family’s enemies were celebrating this victory against us. This victory that Calliope had hand-delivered to them and I had allowed. No one was listening in or spying. For the first time, we could speak the truth clearly and openly before the war board reset itself.
“Let’s go over it all, from the beginning, Calliope.”
“Okay, but afterward, either give me wine or give me death.”
“Deal.”
ONE YEAR LATER
LIAM—PRESENT
I could remember it.
Almost as if it were yesterday.
The clear fucking sign that I should have followed.
The one Melody had flashed but I did not understand. That she, herself, didn’t understand back then.
It was just about twenty years ago; that day, I walked in and saw her seated behind my desk in the study with a strange look on her face.
I remembered.
LIAM—20 YEARS AGO
“Do I even want to know?” I asked when I entered the study only to see her sitting in my chair, legs and arms crossed, glaring at nothing at all…in silence. And for some reason, I had yet to figure out, after all these fucking years, why her silence was always so damn loud. Melody didn’t answer me. She just sat there lost in whatever murderous thought was bubbling over in her mind, which was an answer in itself. I had to know whatever it was that was getting to her so badly. Especially after the week we had just had.
“Mel?”
“Hmmm,” she replied, lifting her head to my voice, her brown eyes finally meeting mine.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” she lied, shaking her head before exhaling and tossing down her phone to pick up whatever desk work she was going to pretend to be interested in.
“So, we’re lying to each other now?” I stated, walking over to the bar and helping myself to some brandy. “Good. Now is the right time to tell you, I like that haircut on you. It’s nice.”
Her head whipped back to me, and whatever murderous plans she had been directing for someone else, she immediately shifted them to me. Her jaw cracked to the side as she leaned back in her chair. “Is that your way of telling me you don’t like my hair?”
I grinned before sipping my drink. “You couldn’t tell by my face?”
“You are such a fucking asshole,” she grumbled, tearing her attention away from me and turning it back to her work.
Stepping over to the side of the desk, I moved to touch her hair, and with
lightning speed, she slapped my hand away like a fly. “If you don’t like it, don’t fucking touch it,” she sneered at me.
“I love your hair. I just hate it when you cut it.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “It’s still past my shoulders.”
“Barely,” I pouted before drinking.
She sighed. “Did you come in here to annoy me?”
“Yes,” I smiled. “But you were already annoyed when I got here, so now I’m curious who's been irritating my wife in my place.”
“You have three children, Liam, when do you plan on not being a child yourself?”
“Ah, so it’s the children annoying you?” I asked, ignoring her comment before shaking my head. “No, even when they drive you close to insanity, you don’t have that look in your eyes.”
“And what look is that, Obi-Wan Kenobi?”
I grinned like a mad man on laughing gas, placing my hand over my heart.
“What?” she snapped at me.
“After all these years and so much effort, you’ve finally joined me on the dark side…get it? Dark side? Star Wars—”
“I will shoot you,” she snapped.
“You do know that threat becomes less menacing each time you shoot me.” I replied with a slight smile.
“How about you stop making me threaten you?”
“How about you just tell me what’s wrong the first time I ask?”
“How about listening when I say nothing is wrong?” I could tell from the look in her eyes she was bothered.
“So, nothing is wrong?”
“That’s what I said.”
“So why were you glaring at the walls?”
“I wasn’t glaring.”
“You were glaring. I know, I saw you; you didn’t see yourself.”
She exhaled. “Liam, I was just thinking.”
“About?”
“Must I share all my thoughts with you?”
“No, but it would be so fucking helpful, baby.” I winked and prepared to duck just in case.
“You aren’t going to leave me alone until you find out, are you?” she questioned.
I lifted my glass to her. “Bingo.”
She huffed. “Of all the men in the world I could have I ended up with…I got you.”
“Aren’t you lucky? Who else would be able to—”
“Careful with your next sentence, husband.” her eyes narrowing as she crossed her arms.
I grinned and let it go. Handing her a glass, I looked to her now. “You’ve been deep in thought all day. What is it? Seriously? I know if it were serious enough to actually be a concern, I would already know. But even small problems are worth my attention.”
“I didn’t tell you because you are going to blow me off,” she grumbled, finishing off the rest of her brandy. She made a face. She hated it but nevertheless drank it whenever I gave it to her.
“Try me anyway.”
“Fine,” she stated, lifting her phone for me to see.
I read the message but didn’t understand. “What does some random plane ticket have to do with us?”
“Look at the name.”
I checked it again. “Calliope Affini? Who is that, and why do we care?”
“Remember that little girl I was speaking to at Wyatt and Dona’s birthday party?”
I thought back, vaguely remembering, even though it was only a few days ago. We’d spoken to so many useless people that they all blurred together.
“The little girl Ethan was in the bathroom with?” she added.
“The little brat who flooded the downstairs guest bathroom?” I snapped, annoyed.
One of the security men had notified me after the party that they had seen Ethan enter with a girl. When I spoke to Ethan about it, he just brushed it off, saying she was weird. And I was more focused on explaining why he shouldn’t be in the bathroom with girls…at least not at his age.
“I expected you to be annoyed that she was alone with your precious Ethan. However, sending her to Italy is a bit harsh, Mel. They are just children. They don’t know—”
“I’m not the one sending her.”
I paused. “So, why do we care again?”
“She has a one-way ticket to Lazio, Italy. Do you know who lives in Lazio, Italy?” she questioned, and before I could answer, she did. “Fiorello Orsini. Do you know who Fiorello Orsini is?”
“He used to work for your father, right?”
“My father use to call him mano sinistra?”
“Left hand?” I snickered. “The nicknames your people come up with.”
“A right-hand man is an indispensable aid, someone you can count on, someone who is a soldier and ready to follow every command, in the most efficient way. But a left-hand man? He is hard to control. He gets the job done but not in the prettiest or best way. He follows orders but also has a mind of his own and sometimes desires to take control. No matter what they do, they are always crooked.”
“And Fiorello was okay with that nickname?” I snickered because it felt more of an insult than an honor.
“My father only told me that,” she said humorlessly, with a serious tone I didn’t quite understand. “My father warned me never to get too close to Fiorello, which was strange to me. I was raised around bad men. Yet he’d never really warned me about anyone except Fiorello Orsini. Normally, I wouldn’t have listened, in order to find out the truth about him myself. If he were completely a loose cannon, my father wouldn’t have him.”
“And what did you discover?”
“Fiorello is a complete and utter psychopath.”
“Mel, I hate to break it to you, but people say we are psychopaths.” In fact, we’ve been called sociopaths, narcissists, narcissistic sociopaths, the list is endless.
“Do you rape women for fun?” She questions.
My eyebrow rose at that, and she simply nodded. “Thought so.”
“He apparently liked a ‘good fight’ in his women. And it was none of my father's business so long as he did his job and didn’t screw us over. Everyone was criminal in some way. My father never really cared about any other women but me…and maybe my mother. But that’s not my point. My point is, no matter how hard and brutal my father was on me, no matter how depraved he was to his enemies, he still wanted me to be as safe as possible.” She frowned as her finger tapped on the now-empty glass of brandy. “We have a daughter the same age as this Calliope. Is there any reason that you would send Dona to a man like Fiorello Orsini?”
I cracked my jaw to the side, now annoyed with the mere question. I glanced down at the phone again. “Who the fuck sends their little girl to a rapist?”
“The son of a rapist,” she answered with ease.
“What?”
“Roman Affini used to be Michelangelo Orsini—the only son of Fiorello Orsini, after your father killed his other sons.”
Now it was coming together. “That nobody family you insist on inviting to all our damn events because you think they’re out for revenge? How long has it been? You warned me about them when we got married. And they have done nothing but make lipstick and eyeshadow. Now you are worrying about why their daughter is going to live with her crazy rapist grandfather?”
“No one just lets go of their children’s murders. My gut tells me something is very wrong with that family. I just can’t put my finger on it. I’m missing something.”
I sighed, tossing the phone onto the table. “So, what do you want to do? Go massacre them all?”
“I knew you would fucking dismiss me,” she cussed, rising from the chair.
“I’m not dismissing you.” I sort of was. “I’m just saying, a plane ticket is not evidence of some massive plot against our family.”
“She told me she was going to get stronger.” She stared me down. “And now she’s going to hell…where a little girl becomes ash or a phoenix.”
“How poetic,” I replied, rising to my feet. “But we have actual enemies to face now. Today. Let’s not make new ones. L
ike I said before, if it bothers you, let’s just kill them and move on. But you need to keep in mind that we aren’t going to have loyal followers if we keep killing off loyal families. Their family hasn’t done anything to us. You’ve checked.”
“You’re reminding me? I’m the one who told you that. You know what? Nevermind. Whatever. This is why I didn’t want to talk to you about this to begin with. I’m going—”
“Relax,” I said, placing my hand on her thigh. Seeing the look on her face, I couldn’t help myself. “You can’t plan to kill little girls with a scowl on your face. You’ll look like a Disney villain—Ah!” I grabbed my nose, taking a step back from the force of her punch. Any harder and she would have broken it!
“Careful, you can’t keep being annoying and getting hit like that. You’re not as young as you used to be. You might end up like Humpty Dumpty,” she snapped back, stepping around the desk toward the door.
“Love you, too,” I grumbled, rubbing my nose.
SLAM.
Over the pain, I rolled my eyes and lifted her forgotten phone, looking over the plane ticket again.
“Her gut,” I muttered.
What possible trouble could a little nobody girl cause?
But it was weird her parents would just send her away. Nope, not falling down that rabbit hole. One of us obsessing over future threats was enough. Calliope Affini or Orsini, or whatever, was not my fucking problem.
LIAM—PRESENT
Calliope Affini or Orsini, or whatever the fuck her name is, is now my fucking problem!